In recent years, various electronic devices, including a tablet, a PDA, and a smartphone, have been developed. Most of the electronic devices of this type include a touchscreen display to facilitate a user input operation.
The user touches a menu or an object displayed on a touchscreen display with a finger or the like, thereby making it possible to instruct a portable electronic device to execute a function related to the menu or object.
However, many of the existing electronic devices with a touchscreen display are consumer products contributing to the operability of image data, music data, and other media data and therefore may not be necessarily suitable for use in business situations, including conferences, business meetings, and product development. Accordingly, paper notebooks have been still widely used in business situations.
A method has been considered which stores handwriting information including a plurality of stroke data items corresponding to a plurality of strokes, respectively, handwritten on a touchscreen display in place of a paper notebook.
In addition, a handwriting search process has been proposed which searches the stored handwriting information for a handwriting information part that has a locus of a stroke whose degree of the similarity with a locus of a stroke corresponding to a specific handwriting information part specified as a search key is greater than or equal to a reference value.
However, in the handwriting search process, an intended handwriting information part was sometimes not searched for, or an unintended handwriting information part was occasionally searched for.